Aristocratic Thieves

  Chapter 23 – Hunting More Russians, Hunting the Antiques

  Jinny took the next day off. He thought that scoring four Russkies on his first day back in town was pretty damn productive. They hadn’t sealed the deal, but his intuition told him the prospects were good. He spent the day relaxing, walking the streets he knew so well, and thinking things over. Plouriva went back to work at her office, but her heart wasn’t in it. She kept thinking of warm ocean breezes, cold champagne, and fresh shrimp on the barbecue. Jinny had tried to describe a barbecue to her, but she couldn’t seem to differentiate it from cooking over a campfire, though it sounded like fun. That evening at the apartment Jinny and Plouriva talked at great length about both objectives: wealthy people sick of cold winters, and stealing property from the Russian government.

  Jinny listed people he had known and worked with years ago. These were not super criminals, by any means, but they weren’t street scamps either. Jinny had achieved a certain level of modest affluence before he made the mistake of chiseling the wrong guy. He rattled off their names to Plouriva one by one, but she didn’t recognize them because until now, she hadn’t been a criminal. She had spent her career working at the Hermitage, moving up the ladder until she was boss of the grounds. Jinny knew this, but he had to start looking for these guys, and one way was to try Plouriva’s contacts. Jinny would make phone calls on Plouriva’s supposedly secure phone line, shake some trees and see what fell out. He decided he was like a detective, most of whom go around asking lots of questions, hoping an answer from someone would lead to gold. Plouriva also would work her contacts, hoping to turn up another nugget like she had with the Gromstovs and Rodstras. She told Jinny she had another prospect or two.

  Then they changed subjects and talked about stuff in the warehouses. Jinny asked if much had changed in the years since he worked at the museum, and Plouriva laughed. She said no, things don’t change much at the big house. The same stuff was inside that had been there for the last two hundred years, and the same stuff was in the warehouses that had been there forever. The Hermitage had stuff distributed throughout its miles of hallways and hundreds of rooms, and rarely felt the need to change or move stuff around. Plouriva told Jinny the same toilet cleaning brushes he had used years ago probably were in the same closets today, which produced in him a very nostalgic feeling.

  That night the two conspirators began to draw sketches of the warehouses and their contents. Plouriva had brought engineering site drawings of the entire complex that included all the buildings, walkways, roads, gardens, and landscaped areas. When Jinny looked at these, he was amazed at the size and scope of the museum complex. He knew the place was huge, but seeing everything condensed onto these sheets of drawings made him realize the magnitude of this environment. No wonder they couldn’t heat and cool everything, and sometimes Plouriva had to use the engine of her World War II halftrack to heat her office.

  They focused on the dozens of warehouses located well away from the main complex. Plouriva described them, and this triggered Jinny’s memories. He began to see the outsides of them and the insides of a few of them. With the structures visualized, Jinny thought about the contents inside. He had been in a few of these, but not all. Plouriva had been in most, but didn’t know much about antiques and artwork. Jinny knew a bit from his time working in the main museum, but he didn’t really know what type of stuff Roger would want to flog in Charleston. So the challenge was to figure out what was in the buildings, and get a description to Roger, who would make suggestions for the theft of the objects. After that, of course, they actually had to steal the objects, steal them and get them across town and onto a container ship headed to Charleston.

  It was late at night by this time, they were tired, and now the brutal reality of their challenge hit them hard. Jinny got up from the bed where they had been working and walked over to the chair at the front window. He closed his eyes and let his mind wander. He tried to do what Kierkegaard had said to do under these circumstances, which was to think without verbalizing inside one’s head. Sometimes Jinny was able to think this way, and he tried to now.

  The amorphous drifting of thought, the visualization of images unattached to cognitions, the unleashing of ideas from the anchors of words. Physically, he drifted outside onto the small balcony overlooking the dumpsters, oblivious to these surroundings and to the feel of the night air on his skin. He thought without internal talk, as the drive to succeed flowed through his body. His visions of burgundy wine and The Deneuve and the Atlantic Ocean and pans of sautéing foods wisped through his consciousness almost as physical sensations. He was in a special place.

  Then a vision assumed center stage, and he knew instinctively to grab it and hold it in place. The vision was an image of one of the engineering drawings Plouriva had shown him earlier. In the drawing, he now noticed that all the wooden warehouses had been built on stilts three feet above ground, and realized this meant there was space under the floors. And he remembered the movie he had watched a year ago, The Great Escape, starring Steve McQueen. In that movie, set in a German prison camp during WWII, British prisoners had planned a mass escape, and a part of their method was to dig tunnels under the barrack buildings. In his mind’s eye, Jinny could see these scenes from the movie. He could see the wooden barracks, and he watched as the prisoners hid under the ground-level floors while digging and hiding supplies. He saw Steve McQueen leading the operation, directing the guys, creating and mounting the great escape.

  From this vision came his idea for the theft of Russian antiques and artwork. Get into the warehouses that held the goods Roger wanted. Cut through the wood flooring and pass the objects to the spaces below. Hide the objects there until the one big evacuation, when all of them would be pulled out of the crawl spaces, loaded onto trucks, and transported out of the complex. If McQueen could do that with a hundred prisoners, Jinny could do it with a hundred pieces of art. They could do this because Plouriva knew the grounds, and knew the security systems.

  Jinny’s brain stopped its seething and he returned to normal consciousness. He found himself on the balcony, and didn’t remember going out onto it. He returned inside to the bedroom, where Plouriva slept, and the clock said 4am. He went to the mirror, looked at himself, put his hands to the sides of his head and pressed inwards, letting the pressure of his hands drive out the remnants of his stress. It worked. He relaxed, opened his eyes, and smiled at himself. He felt tired, but he felt good. America, and the Junes, and Plouriva were good for his thinking. He knew this caper could be had.